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Do Old Date Palms Go To Heaven

Medjool Date palms and other date palms can grow to about 150 years.  These date palms can produce fruit for about 150 years.  The problem in harvesting and tending to older medjool dates is that they are high.  They are very high.  Medjool dates require a lot of hands on labor that makes it difficult to tend to medjool date palms.  Other date palms do not require much hands on tending, but still require the fruit be harvested by hand.  So what do you do when it becomes not only expensive but dangerous to harvest those medjool dates from the medjool date palms ?  Well these medjool date palms go to market.  Not the piggy market.  The landscaping market.  Medjool Date Palms are sought out because of their beauty and because of the tolerance for drought.  They require much less maintenace than trees and can do well without much water.  Water is essential to produce the fruit, but in environments where it rains and where the weather is not hot the medjool date palm cannot be used successfully to grow fruit.  In these places the medjool date palm produces virtually no fruit and are well received as landscaping palms.  Most medjool date palms go out to market once they are about 20-30 feet.

Growing Stuff In Between Date Palms

Historically date palms are spaced at significant distances.  About 20 feet or more.  In between there is a lot of empty space.  This empty space is used often used to plant vegetables or other fruit trees.  Sometimes apricots, figs, lemons, limes, and grapefruit trees are planted inbetween the date palms.  It is pretty much the practice regardless of whether the date palm is a medjool date plam or a deglet noor date palm.  This was and is a means of making better use of the land and water.  Flooding is often used as a means of irrigating date palm orchards, but the practice is changing.  Some date palm orchards are irrigated with very efficient drip systems.

A Balloon Ride In Palm Springs

Among the toursit attractions in the winter time in the Palm Springs are is balloon rides.  There are lots of hot hair balloon rides in the winter time.  From  up high in the balloons the people look down and see the neatly rows of medjool date palms and deglet noor date palms.  They may look down on the rows of pink grapefruit or the grape vines.   Sometimes the dumb operators decided to drop down on open farmfields inbetween the medjool date palm rows or inbetween the citrus orchards.  As they come down they cause damage to the new crops just coming out.  The tourists climb down destroying the young vegetable plants that are just a few days old.   The poor farmers upset complain and the baloon ride operators brush it off with an I am sorry.  So passes another day in the medjool date palm lined streets of the Coachella Valley.

Dates Fruit Medjool Dates